Anatomy of Malice

The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals

Joel E. Dimsdale

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780300220674
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología forense

An eminent psychiatrist delves into the minds of Nazi leadershipin "a fresh look at the nature of wickedness, and at our attempts to explain it" (Sir Simon Wessely, Royal College of Psychiatrists). When the ashes had settled after World War II and the Allies convened an international war crimes trial in Nuremberg, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, and a psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, tried to fathom the psychology of the Nazi leaders, using extensive psychiatric interviews, IQ tests, and Rorschach inkblot tests. The findings were so disconcerting that portions of the data were hidden away for decades and the research became a topic for vituperative disputes. Gilbert thought that the war criminals' malice stemmed from depraved psychopathology. Kelley viewed them as morally flawed, ordinary men who were creatures of their environment. Who was right? Drawing on his decades of experience as a psychiatrist and the dramatic advances within psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience since Nuremberg, Joel E. Dimsdale looks anew at the findings and examines in detail four of the war criminals, Robert Ley, Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher, and Rudolf Hess. Using increasingly precise diagnostic tools, he discovers a remarkably broad spectrum of pathology. Anatomy of Malice takes us on a complex and troubling quest to make sense of the most extreme evil. "In this fascinating and compelling journey... a respected scientist who has long studied the Holocaust asks probing questions about the nature of malice.I could not put this book down."—Thomas N. Wise, MD, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine "This harrowing tale and detective story asks whether the Nazi War Criminals were fundamentally like other people, or fundamentally different."—T.M. Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real

PART ONE

RUN-UP TO NUREMBERG

1

The Holocaust: How Was This Genocide Different from All the Rest?

I’d like to call them all by name,

But they took away the list, and there is nowhere to find out.

For them I have woven a broad shroud

From their poor, overheard words.

—Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem,” 1940*

During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try, I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. . . . Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.

—German policeman writing home about shooting Jews in the Ukraine, October 1941

The Blood Lands of Europe

WHEN I WAS LITTLE, I HAD A PRETTY sketchy idea about death. I had an even vaguer idea about large numbers. Coming from a region where the four-footed mammals vastly outnumbered the two-footed mammals, I had no idea what “millions” of deaths could mean.

I also had rather limited models of malice. Every Saturday afternoon I would walk to the Uptown Theater, pay a quarter, and watch Westerns or monster movies. The monsters back then were never human. Usually, they were large, angry animals—spiders, say, and who knew what went on in their nasty arachnid brains? The alternatives to the large, angry animal monsters were zombies, and it was obvious that their brains weren’t right. As I got older, I learned about offscreen monsters—people who were consumed by rage, jealousy, and sheer nastiness. The scope of the killings in the blood lands of Europe defies comprehension. How can thinking human beings resort to such malice?

I grew up to be a psychiatrist, not a historian, but I sit with patients and take histories all day long. What motivated my patient’s actions? What did the patient do with his or her life? What were the consequences of these life choices? I have tacitly asked similar questions about the war criminals who are the focus of this book, but these questions also help in framing the unique nature of the Nazi genocide more broadly.¹

When World War II finally ended, forty million men, women, and children were dead in Europe. That people die in war is expected—that is, after all, the point, to achieve aims through violence—but two-thirds of these deaths were noncombatants.²

Although noncombatant deaths in warfare are not unique, usually they involve people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes, however, as a matter of policy, states conduct genocide against whole peoples—soldiers and civilians alike. Most countries and cultures have resorted to genocide at some point in their history, and in most cases this was simply blood lust. When people’s arms grew tired, they stopped killing. The Holocaust, however, was different. It was a genocide characterized by sustained killing operations, orchestrated with stunning attention to detail, by one of the most civilized countries in the world. It was also one of the largest mass killings ever known. In his brilliant book Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder pointed out the immense scope of the killing: “On any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian empire.”³

I used to wonder: What kind of individuals could design such a killing machine? I still do.

I also wonder whether people remember.

One week before invading Poland, Adolf Hitler urged a merciless campaign and is reported to have said: “Who . . . speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”⁴ Whether the quotation is accurate as reported, it highlights a distressing point. If no one remembers genocide, can it be said to have occurred? It’s akin to the proverbial question “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” In the case of the Jews, Poles, Armenians, Bangladeshis, Tutsi, Cambodians, people from Darfur, and all of the other victims of the countless other campaigns of mass killings, it is clear that survivors do remember, but how well does the rest of the world remember?

I hesitated about providing a broad overview of the Holocaust in this book because some readers will already be knowledgeable, but I have learned not to make assumptions. Many years ago, I asked Jewish Sunday school students what the “final solution of the Jewish problem” meant and if they could name two concentration camps. They couldn’t, and their lack of knowledge was not unusual.

During the Adolf Eichmann trial, when news coverage was so extensive, investigators polled hundreds of adults in Oakland, California, about their perspectives on the trial.⁵ Sixteen percent of the respondents were unaware of the trial at all. The investigators pressed further. Among the 384 people who knew that there was an ongoing trial, 59 percent indicated that Eichmann was a Nazi. The rest guessed that he was a communist, a Jew, or “other,” or they had no absolutely no idea who he was, even though they knew he was on trial for something. The researchers also studied which sorts of people paid attention to news about the trial. Whites were more likely to know about the trial but less likely to know about the Freedom Riders, who were also in the news at the time. Conversely, African Americans were less likely to know about the trial, but almost all of them had heard of the Freedom Riders. In other words, people disregarded news that was not salient or relevant to them.

People ignore, deny, forget, or never learn. In one of his final publications, the historian Raul Hilberg issued a sobering challenge: “The fact is that Holocaust research is now in a kind of ‘ghetto,’” a highly specialized corner of historiography.⁶ As I write these words today, seventy years have passed since the Nuremberg war crimes trial. I suspect that some readers will not be clear about what led up to the trial or why the debates about the Nazis’ psychiatric diagnoses became so all-consuming and sulfurous. This chapter, then, provides a broad overview.

Rationale for the Mass Killings

The Nazi machinery of destruction targeted many types of people—Jews, Roma, Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally infirm—but principally the Jews. This book is more of a meditation on diagnoses than motivations. It is beyond the scope of this book to examine the complexity of Nazi motivations that drove the murders.⁷ Indeed, for some, these analyses of motivation have been an anathema. Witness the statement of the poet Yitzhak Katzsnelson: “I utterly repudiate every reason or formula that . . . ‘scholars’ . . . put forward to explain this abomination. I despise whoever utters such stupidity and nonsense. . . . What possible connection . . . can this political economy have with the criminal wantonness which this beast in human form metes out to us?”⁸

Nonetheless, three dominant features coalesced to make the Jewish genocide particularly devastating: anti-Semitism grounded in religious tradition, social Darwinism, and the ruination that followed World War I.

For centuries, anti-Semitism had been stoked in the churches. The Jews were accused, at best, of spurning Christianity and, at worst, of being Christ killers. They were readily identifiable by unusual customs in dress, diet, and holidays. In many countries, they were coerced into centuries-long occupational patterns that made them reviled, and they were forced to live apart. Jews were objects of fear and loathing, targets for projected feelings of rage and aggression. When a violent crime was committed, it was assumed that “the Jews” had done it, not just “done it,” but “done it” out of pure intentionality, malice, and depravity. Paradoxically, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire started modernizing and lessening some of the anti-Jewish restrictions, popular anti-Semitism increased. No longer were the Jews sequestered; instead, there was a collision of cultures, and anti-Semites felt under assault because of their increased interactions with Jews. With assimilation, people feared a malign, hidden influence of Jews who blended in with the surrounding culture.⁹ The fact that some Jews prospered was an additional source of outrage.

Social Darwinism comprised the second toxic strand that contributed to the Nazi genocide. Following the discovery of the New World, Europeans were increasingly struck by the disparities in race and culture as well as the disparate living conditions of newly encountered peoples. The thinking was that non-Europeans who lived in less developed cultures did so because that was all that they were capable of—they had bad genes. On the other hand, the people who thrived had better genes and were more fit. Any taint of a different race, no matter how miniscule, was assumed to carry with it a genetic proclivity to disease and backwardness. If one culled animals to improve the breed, why not cull humans to eliminate undesirable traits or groups?

Race was carried in the blood. This belief added new meaning to the term “blood crime.” If you carried the wrong blood, you were like a carrier of cholera who would bring death and destruction to those around you. It made no difference if you converted to Christianity sincerely; the “fact” was that you carried the evil in your blood, and that evil was beyond redemption.

Enormous scholarly efforts were dedicated to recognizing hidden racial characteristics. Once race was diagnosed, it was simply a matter of eugenics to design a better world: don’t let “them” breed or at least make sure they bred only with each other so that any racial stigmata would be obvious for all to see. In only a matter of time, so the prevailing belief went, the inferiors would be bred out and one would have a strong society.

What is interesting about the eugenics argument is that the target group kept shifting from more easily distinguishable groups like blacks to other groups that were less easy to recognize: Jews, Roma, Slavs, Poles. The eugenics ideology focused on other subgroups as well: mentally handicapped individuals, psychiatric patients, homosexuals, and criminals. If all of these people could be rounded up, they could not infect others. If all could be sterilized, then the genetic contamination would cease, once and for all. It was a small but logical step from sterilization to killing. Wouldn’t it be better to eliminate these diseases (that is, people) and get it over with more quickly?

The third factor that engendered the Nazi mass killings was the chaos following World War I. That war, so incredibly costly in lives and resources, ended with Germany’s defeat. Not only had Germany lost the war, but it faced devastating and humiliating financial terms from the Versailles settlement. Germany’s government could not counter the massive inflation and ruin, and millions of Germans brooded. Oddly, the Jews were viewed as in league with both the communists on the left and the capitalists on the right. Clearly, they must have conspired together to take their revenge on Germany. Clearly, they must be punished.

In those days of fiscal uncertainty and scarcity, there was not enough food to share with so-called useless eaters and vermin. Thus, Hitler’s vision was to obliterate all the undesirables and to provide the purified Aryan nation with the freed-up space and confiscated resources so that a resurgent Germany could rule the world in security and plenty. With a strong leader, he believed that Germany would march from humiliation to triumph and complete its manifest destiny by expanding east into a fruitful land that had been cleared of all nondesirables. It was an intoxicating idea that swept the nation.

The Steps to Genocide

Whatever their motivations, it was the behavior of the Nazis that brought them to trial, and it was the peculiar nature of the killing and the kill...